The American Hospitality industry has undergone a sea change, driven by two technological drivers. The first is the demise of the full service travel agent; sure, there are still a handful around catering to the extreme high end resorts, but the concept of families going to a travel agency to book a comprehensive vacation has been replaced with outfits like Hotels.com and Priceline.com, where everything is driven by comparison shopping.
This has had upsides and downsides for the industry as a whole; the upside is that we no longer have to pay commissions to travel agencies for bookings, and hotels are much likelier to get accurate data entry done by the customers themselves. Even with the tremendous price pressure aiming for the lowest costs, the margins remain roughly the same.
The downside is that property visibility is at a premium never before imagined. Your hotel MUST have a web site, and it must have a reservation system that's easy to navigate...and most importantly, it must be found.
Section I: The Need
Driving traffic to your web site is done through a process called "search engine optimization" or SEO. SEO is built on the principle that most people will click on a link from a search engine if it's near the top of the page for that organic search result.
Google is the dominant search engine in the industry, and getting the top ranked organic search notification on Google for a given phrase is the goal of every marketing company out there. Google has several techniques it uses (they're all kept secret for obvious reasons) to determine page ranks. Some have been reverse engineered:
Section II: The Methods
Keyword density. Google is trying to use the way that certain words appear in the English language to determine overall relevance; this includes techniques like tracking how frequently a phrase appears on a web page.
Latent Semantic Indexing: This is a relatively new wrinkle. Google has become aware of web sites that try to overuse keywords to build up their page ranks. While no computer program can 'read' English and determine if a paragraph is gibberish or not, Latent Semantic Indexing tries to find if the keyword and several common reformulations in different grammatical structures are present in a page; this is used as an indicator that the page is meant to be read by human beings.
Relevance by backlinking. One other way that Google and Yahoo determine how a page ranking occurs comes from how many web sites point back to a page. This means that articles talking about your hotel's city as a vacation destination that link back to your hotel's web site make your web site more appealing and relevant for page ranking.
Paid Search Ads: Google (and all of the other search vendors) will sell you an ad that appears on the search results for a given keyphrase; it's easy to distinguish from the organic search results, but it's something that's available. A good SEO strategy mixes paid ads and organic search options together.
Social Networking Sites: While a page ranked highly in search engines is one thing, one of the latest trends on the Internet is the "Wisdom of Crowds"; to some extent, the major hotel booking sites already do this. The logic is that by having your web site (or hotel) mentioned on major social networking sites like Facebook and Digg, you'll drive more customers to them by the Internet equivalent of word of mouth and personal testimonial advertising.
All of these techniques rely on you being able to make a succinct summation of what people would be looking for to find your web site. For example, if you're doing golf packages in Myrtle Beach", "golf packages Myrtle Beach" would be an obvious one. However, a less than obvious one might be "Jack Parr Golf", since Myrtle Beach has three courses designed by Parr, all of them tied to resorts that sell package deals.
Finding the right keywords to optimize for is a task that will require some brainstorming and some expertise.
Now, there's more to this process than raw search. Your web site has to be "search engine friendly" - search engines don't read web sites the same way human beings do. They look for specific traits in the web site. There are things you can do to make your web site easier for search engine programs to read that won't impair how they work for your customers. There are also things you may be doing inadvertently with your web site that make it more difficult for search engines to find it - not putting meta data in at the headers is a big one, as is an over-reliance on Flash versus cascading style sheets.
Section III: The Talent
Getting your web site optimized for search and for traffic generation is a job for a trained specialist. Even more important is one who understands the ins and outs of the hospitality industry; ideally, you want a search engine specialist who's got experience with sites in real estate, and tour booking sites.
These specialists can help you pinpoint the search phrases you need to get people to your web sites, including particular key-phrases that will get people who want to come to your location, or for specific amenities.
Search engine marketing is a mixture of engineering and art; you'll want to work with a company that understands that marketing is not about single method choices. It's a multidisciplinary field that leverages a lot of prior knowledge, coupled with an ever-shifting dynamic as search engines evolve.
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